Hi Hank, I'm curious, which PIMs have you worked on in the past? I'm a big fan of EccoPro (still use it daily) and even have a couple of Agenda files that I occasionally open and add things to.
As you've noted, Chandler's terminology and UI are quite influenced by GTD, and I agree with your point that it would be good to get rid of unnecessary jargon. "Triage" is a good example: it seems like several people brought up "status" as a more understandable alternative, which I also quite like. On the other hand, I think your perspective is at times a little too harsh and perhaps also too strongly anchored in your use of iTunes (or other apps). For example, "collection" is a pretty common English word, why is it less descriptive of a "group of things" than a "folder"? I don't know iTunes that well (although I do use it to listen to podcasts), but I don't dispute that "folder" by now is a well established word in the computer usage. However, in the most common use by far it means a bunch of files. This common usage further implies that there is a hierarchy (or tree) of folders, and that each file (or item) can only belong to one folder. Neither is true in Chandler's case: collections are not hierarchical and an item can belong to multiple collections. Dashboard is a term that I'm more ambivalent about. It's another one of GTD-ish terms, although it is also one that is increasingly common in business applications that give a one-page, easy to understand status overview of some process or operation. If that were indeed what the Dashboard view did in Chandler, I would feel a lot more strongly about it. However, it does not right now, and serves more-or-less as a union of some subset of available collections. (Plus Dashboard-only items, as Heikki pointed out, although this doesn't seem to be that common in everyday usage.) Discussion about Dashboard redesign seems to pop up every now and then, but so far with no visible changes in the app, as far as I can tell. If this redesign is not going to be done in the 1.0 timeframe, maybe it's better to just not have the Dashboard collection at all, rethink it fully when there is more time, and add it with great fanfare for 2.0. :-) Davor On Saturday 08 December 2007 16:07:48 hank williams wrote: > Philip, > > Thanks for your comments. I'll take two out of three! > > As for your views on tag or category, and needing something more > concrete I can agree with that. As I said in my next post, iTunes > uses the word folders and it works *exactly* the way (at least as I > understand them) collections do. iTunes is a pretty popular app and > so you would gain enormously by leveraging that nomenclature. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Open Source Applications Foundation "Design" mailing list http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/design
